Hewlett-Packard can’t say it wasn’t warned about Autonomy - it just chose not
to listen.

Several UK stockmarket analysts issued critical research notes on the company in 2010-11 advising investors to sell. The fact Mike Lynch, Autonomy’s founder and chief executive, last year found someone to buy the company in the form of Leo Apotheker, then chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, was his greatest master stroke to date – shareholders should be forever grateful.

Lynch was fond of telling his UK critics that they didn’t understand his complex software business. It was the Americans who really got companies like his, Lynch insisted.

So well did the Americans understand Autonomy, Apotheker rushed out and paid $10bn (£7bn) in cash for it, giving Lynch a job at HP and netting him an $800m fortune.

That’s $10bn, out of HP’s free cash of $13bn, for a company with revenues of $870m at the end of 2010, versus HP’s $126bn.

Apotheker has since gone. Lynch is on his way, too, with new HP boss Meg Whitman describing Autonomy as “disappointing”. Discussing Autonomy’s performance yon Thursday with analysts, the US company’s finance director Kathie Lesjak told analysts: "License revenue was disappointing, sales execution was a challenge and big deals were taking longer to close."

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But with US investors suing Facebook and its advisers over its IPO, which raised $16bn, the chances are HP shareholders will, at the very least, want answers to some awkward questions over its acquisition of Autonomy and the due diligence process surrounding the deal. Was it just three weeks, as rumoured in London, or longer?

It is certainly disappointing for HP shareholders that a new acquisition should contribute so little to earnings so soon after it was bought. Even Meg Whitman said back in November that the integration of Autonomy into HP was going well.

Some will say this is a classic case of an entrepreneurial business being bought by a hulking, bureaucratic institution which failed to integrate it and failed to understand its culture. Others will say HP, desperate to do a deal, simply overpaid for a company that was going to struggle to maintain its sales and earnings momentum and was deluded about its abilities.

Certainly warnings about the latter were there for HP to see before it handed over all that cash.

Here’s what Marc Geall, a Deutsche Bank analyst who used to work at Autonomy, said in October 2010 about the business model: “…investment in the business has lagged revenues... [which] could affect customer satisfaction towards the product and the value it delivers."

He went on to warn that Autonomy's service business was "too lean" and that it "risks falling short of standards demanded by customers". All of which prompted Geall to question whether the company needed to change its business model - "traditionally, software companies have needed to change their business models at around $1bn in revenues".

Geall was not alone. In January last year Roger Phillips and John McPate, then analysts at Evolution Securities, issued a “sell” note saying: “The failure to have a large acquisition contribute meaningfully in Q4 has us on red alert. The 'Put Fast in the Past' aggressive discounting campaign heightens our concern that Q4 is extremely difficult. We would be Sellers into an impromptu trading update likely in early January.”

And then in April last year Paul Morland, an analyst at Peel Hunt, issued a “sell” note on Autonomy with a summary saying: “Following further work on Autonomy’s recent announcements, we lower our price target by 200p and highlight our key concerns around today’s results, which unusually will be released at 12.30pm due to 'scheduling conflicts'.”

With Apotheker gone and Lynch on his way, Witman hopes to put the Autonomy deal behind here. But HP shareholders, and some of the 25,000 workers about to lose their jobs as the company scales back, may be less willing to forgive and forget how the company chose to spend $10bn of its cash.